Homeworld
by Seraphim.Saga
Summary: I wrote this just to be able to look at Mass Effect from the perspective of humanity. Their first contact ended in war and the Turians proved themselves willing to do anything to win. Even going so far as to drop asteroids on civilian cities. The citadel was unaware of this until the Turians mobilized their full fleets, preparing for war. Humanity will stand firm among the stars.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

xoxoxoxo

The damaged Prothean destroyer limped forward. The last battle had crippled it and now they were soon going to crash. There were many things worse than that though.

Their civilization had mostly ended hundreds of years earlier when the Reapers had exploded out of the Citadel and immediately laid waste to their capitol and all of the leaders.

From there they simply had to jump from system to system and kill every thing. It was a rather ingenious plan. Let the races of the galaxy develop along the lines of predetermined technology and when it was time the Reapers would face known and expected resistance.

The Protheans had managed to hold out far longer than any previous species ever had, but it was not enough. The crew knew that, it was the very reason they came here after all.

The planet below them was rich with life, and potential. There were others of course, but this planet had something most others did not.

A total lack of element zero.

Without that critical substance any developments on this planet would be slow and costly. The reapers would most likely ignore the planet and it's inhabitants.

That was the critical point. If they ignored the planet then they might be able to provide a fast start and a warning about the Citadel itself.

Running into a Reaper group had not been in their plans. Neither was the damages to the ships engines. They were damaged beyond FTL capability and so they had to resort to the slow approach.

Decent and landing had never been considered until they entered the atmosphere. They were dead in the water, so to say, and simply prepared for a crash landing.

The island they hit was a part of a greater set of islands. Though they had prepared for the crash most of the crew still died on landing. The ship buried itself mostly under a land slide.

Several years later a Reaper Destroyer passed by, doing a sweep, but not finding the buried ship just left the uninteresting planet alone.

For the next several months the survivors buried their dead and prepared the ship and all of it's technology for a long hibernation. The species inhabiting this planet still had a long way ahead of them before they could reach for the stars.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is let go. Mona was just as likely to hold on to the old as anyone else. Right now that had to do with plunderers. Several villages along the coast had recently been raided and they all feared the worst.

One day a fisher lost at sea during a storm returned speaking of several islands far out into the sea. He spoke of lush green fields and hills leading up to a great mountain.

The village elders sent word to the other villages and the decision was made, they would abandon their homes at the end of winter and begin their new life once spring arrived.

They settled on the largest island and named their new home Atlantis. Life was easy here on the island. The ground, once an old volcano, was very fertile and their crops grew plentiful and healthy.

The villages, now safe on their island home, spread far and wide. Settlements sprung up along the coast and soon most of the edges of the island was inhabited.

Mona was truly happy that she left. This island was like a paradise. One day, high in the mountains, she got caught in a sudden rainstorm and sought shelter in the nearest cave.

The moment she stepped inside she knew that something was wrong.

First it was too cold.

Second the walls were smooth.

Third, there was clearly some sort of door in the wall.

Looking around she saw some pictures along the edge depicting a human touching a flat square with their hand and the door opening.

She found the flat thing and brushed it clean from dust before placing her had flat against it. Alight shimmered across the surface making her take several steps back.

Then the door opened and she stepped inside.

Corridors led in two directions, one was bright with some unseen light, the other was dark.

With the storm outside and the exciting mystery inside she made up her mind and entered fully.

A hundred years later the eroded volcano collapsed, dragging the entire island down with it. Though there were no survivors of Atlantis, their legacy would live on.

Treasure hunters and explorers would fine comb the ocean floor looking for proof. It took until 2018 for anyone to find conclusive proof of an advanced civilization when an ancient settlement was excavated.

The bones had been burned. That in itself wasn't so special, the melted rock underneath was.

Archaeologists excavated hundreds of square meters and forensic experts from the police were called to the scene to perform an investigation. The purpose was to get some understanding of what had happened long ago.

Molten streaks crisscrossed the stone. Mostly straight lines. It was their conclusion that several individuals had stood in the center and used an unknown weapon to kill the victims.

Further studies of the bones and the stone revealed that the weapon had to have been either plasma or some form of particle weapon.

It was a shock to the world at large as it confirmed an advanced civilization somewhere on Earth roughly 4000 BC.

August 2018. Korlaz, a Greek scientific exploration ship preformed a deep sonar scan of a mostly empty stretch of ocean floor.

They found two things. Building ruins deep under ground and a very significant metal object nearly four hundred meters long.

Humanity had rediscovered Atlantis.

The next twenty years was used to complete the largest underwater excavation ever as the object was unearthed from its watery grave. It was confirmed to be a spaceship of some kind, confirming theories about Atlantis having been visited by aliens.

It would take another ten years before humanity managed to move the gargantuan ship onto the shore so that they could study it better.

Like Mona had long before, a human again placed their hand on the flat panel, opening Pandora's box.

Instead of releasing all the evils of the world, humanity found the future.

* * *

A/N

This story has nothing to do with any of my other stories!

For this story I put a crashed Prothean ship on Earth instead of on Mars. There are no Mars Archives in this story as there is no need for one. All useful data on the reapers is inside the computers of the ship.

The Prothean ship is from the later part of the war and thus is equipped with particle weaponry instead of the earlier mass accelerators.

Humanity is not stronger than the other species, they are in fact a lot closer to canon strength. This means that only the Turians have a larger military, the rest would get trampled by the humans. This includes the terminus systems who aren't nearly as well equipped as they presents themselves. It's just a show to avoid being forced into obeying the citadel council.

Most technology I will ascribe to humanity in this story is relevant technology we already have today or in early development. At least I will try to do so.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

xoxoxoxo

Atlantis had finally been found. The long lost island had haunted humanity for thousands of years and though the excavations underground would lead to many amazing discoveries, the spaceship would jump technology forward by 200 years.

The ship and it's contents had obviously been treated as a shrine by the Atlantean people and thankfully left mostly undisturbed. The ship itself would take another fifty years to restore back to working order but during those five decades human science and technology evolved by a very massive margin.

The VI programming, as horribly degraded as it was, provided humanity with the tools to make their own VI drones. Robotic helpers suitable for pretty much any environment and situation.

Advanced weapons, specifically the particle rifles that archaeologists had found evidence of earlier became the focus for military development. Examining the ship revealed that it too was equipped with a massive spinal mounted version of the same weapon.

This revelation led theorists to believe that this civilization had entirely abandoned physical weapons in lieu of more damaging directed energy weapons. It's not like human weapons were solely based on solid slugs for munitions. Experiments had been conducted on properly weaponizing lasers and even early magnetic corridor plasma weapons.

The first functioning fusion reactor, Jotunheim in Norway, paved the way for bigger as well as smaller fusion reactors, largely replacing old and dangerous nuclear power plants. The larger ones powered Earths growing cities with green energy while the smaller ones eventually became so small that they were reclassified as micro-fusion reactors.

In short humanity would likely have developed similar weapons on their own with time. The only difference was that now they had access to functioning prototypes.

In spring of 2083, The spaceship was finally repaired and the new fusion reactor powered up the internal systems. Several things happened at once. First the unknown core powered up, then the entire ship lifted up from the dry dock to float a few meters above the landing struts.

Inside the ship all electronics activated and for the first time the scientists got the chase to study their language.

Star charts were displayed on holographic consoles while readouts scanned the portion of Earth it could reach. Within a few years linguistics theorists managed to extrapolate enough of a translation to at least be able to read the readings.

Eezo seemed to be entirely missing from the scanner sweep. As they had learned from the computers, it was a very important substance as it allowed spaceflight at FTL speeds. The complete lack of such a element on Earth would ultimately hamper any dreams of constructing additional ships.

With only one functioning ship in their possession, humanity had to improvise. SkyVault was jointly constructed with the help from the NASA and ESA as well as the Russian and Chinese space agencies. The joint venture surpassed national interests and the station, a massive 200 meter in diameter ring-world style facility became home to nearly a thousand humans.

Sky Vault had been made by loading the spaceship with materials and flying into orbit with it. This meant that the ship could do several trips every day at minimal, even negligible cost. The station served as more than just a research station. It was also humanities first space construction facility.

by the year 2100 nine ships had been built. The planets in the system had also been visited and scanned. The Earths moon, Luna, had some trace amounts of Eezo. It wasn't much but it was more than nothing.

Mining was dangerous and several people died to get the rare element. With it more ships could be outfitted with the newly minted "Gravity Cores". Shuttles flied to and from SkyVault on a steady schedule.

The need for a bigger station would eventually lead to the conclusion that Earth itself wouldn't be able to supply the construction by it's lonesome. Scanning probes burrowed deep into the crusts of the other planets looking for metals.

Mercury contained an abnormal amount of rich metal deposits but it's proximity to the sun mad mining stupidly dangerous, but the need for metal forced their hand and experimental work units were built to allow human operators to land on the planet and begin mining operations. To aid them they had Gravitational Pulverizers, essentially tubes containing an Eezo core to create conflicting fields of small localized gravitational fields.

Withing the year, military scientist managed to weaponize those walking tanks and refine them into sturdier and more maneuverable units. Standing at four meter tall and with four arms, they were just as good at lifting and manipulating heavy objects as they were at combat and wielding weapons.

The four arms were a compromise made to allow them the ability to manipulate objects in space with better precision.

As particle rifles became the norm, armor changed to match. At first they tried with different materials but the beams just burned right through it. Then they tried the insanely expensive diamond vapor deposition method. It worked better but not good enough to make it worth the cost. In the end they settled for a combination of ultra dense woven metals layers with a coat of diamond paint. It was a compromise that offered the most and sacrificed the least.

It was also really really good looking.

Bullets would just bounce off of it and the beams would have to burn for several seconds just to evaporate the diamond paint. By mixing hardened layers with soft ones they managed to create a very durable type of armor that would become the norm for the foreseeable future.

Weapons and armor were not the only thing to develop, in the field of medicine there had been some very pleasant breakthroughs. Medical 3d printers using bioink had long been used to create replacement organs, even entire limbs, but the biggest improvement came when several of the largest private companies merged to create the massive Sirta Foundation.

It was a brave project but their development of gene therapy to cure diseases quickly made it one of the wealthiest companies on Earth. When they partnered with up-and-coming nano-robotics firm Umbra tech, most people thought it nothing more than a PR stunt.

The following year they revealed the first fully functioning micro fabricator unit able to repair human tissue inside the body, using stem cells and bioink. The press was decidedly not impressed, such technology had been around for the past decade already. When famous star Oriana Haliwell was shot on stage most expected her to die from the wounds. The immediate application of medi-gel saved her life. The nano machines could work independently of any instructions and worked so fast that by the time the paramedics arrived the wound was all but gone.

As one might expect, Sirta became the largest medical company on the planet practically overnight. The military requested they construct a wearable framework for use in the armor of soldiers. The medi-gel, containing stem cells, bioink and nano machines, would be stored inside containers the size of a pen and could easily be replaced one used. All armors were equipped with life support webbing allowing medi-gel to be applied anywhere on the body from a central unit.

All of these factors contributed to the rapid expansion of human territory. Mars, long thought of as uninhabitable, had undergone primary and secondary terraforming and was ready for tertiary terraforming. With an atmosphere able to support life, and it's ice melted, the planet had been seeded and was expected to be fully habitable by the end of the 2103.

2125\. Pluto's moon Charon was revealed to not actually be a moon but a giant artificial structure, identified by the Prothean ship as a relay. For the first time ever humans had the ability to reach other stars. There would have been a swift exploration and colonization rush had not the system been nearly devoid of Eezo.

Instead of a rush, every relay cluster was developed at a moderate pace, Arcturus Station, a big five kilometer in diameter ring world type station acted as the last line of defense for the Sol system. The Utopia and the Asgard systems could be reached from there. The abundance of natural resources sparked an industrial revolution and soon both of these systems had large and thriving mining colonies on them.

The lack of reliable sources of Eezo would be humanities biggest detractor from explosive exploration.

The garden worlds Tyr, Terra Nova and Eden Prime required minimal effort to colonize and four billion humans left home for life among the stars. The sudden influx of goods provided the military with the resources to field two more fleets, each one dedicated to the defense of their own system, while ships and manpower to the Arcturus fleet.

The worlds would grow at their own pace, there was never a shortage of humans willing to settle new worlds.

by 2050 multiple Ring world space station dotted the skies of every human world. The decision was made by the UNATCO, the Unite Nations Allied Territories Coalition, to unlock another relay and prepare to explore the next area.

The relay led to a cluster that was named the Shadow Sea. The star system Lera was found to contain one habitable planet named Horizon. Again many humans spread out and millions settled on the planet. The system itself was fairly rich in minerals and by 2055 had constructed it's own defense fleet. Like all other systems they too provided ships and manpower for the UNATCO Fleet, now numbering at nearly a thousand ships strong.

2157\. The Kepler Verge relay was unlocked and a fleet of explorers, guarded by six Alliance ships left. Only one returned.

* * *

A/N

 **Current Human settled planets are** : (sorted by population)

Earth - 8.9 billion

Mars - 4.4 billion

Eden Prime - 1,6 billion

Terra Nova - 1,5 billion

Tyr - 900 million

Horizon - 300 million

Total population estimated at 17,4-17.6 billion, Space stations hold nearly 100 million.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

xoxoxoxo

To most of the Citadel species, the Attican Traverse was outlaw territory. Home to the Batarians, the Vorcha and the Krogans, it was no wonder why most avoided it. The traverse stood as a no mans land between the unruly Terminus systems and Citadel space.

When Salarian STG units spotted several Batarian raider fleets moving through it they sent out warnings to the nearby patrol fleets. Small skirmishes erupted between the two forces and eventually the fleets were pushed back.

Citadel regulations forbid any fleet from entering the traverse for fear of war. With the knowledge that pirate and raider fleets were nearby all patrol fleets were on edge, and when Turian captain Minn Actas spotted unknown ships attempting to open a previously dormant relay he immediately ordered his fleet to open fire without warning.

To his surprise the ships seemed to lack shields, but their armor made up for it, requiring dozens of hits before they started showing signs of breaking. Many rounds penetrated the armor but the actual damage was minimal.

The smaller ships were quickly dispatched of, leaving only the six larger ones. One of those fled through another relay that according to the records should have been dormant. Captain Actas believed that the raiders had become so bold as to randomly open dormant relays.

Determined to eradicate the problem quickly he ordered his fleet to pursue the last ship once he had managed to dispose of the others. Before he left he sent a message back to the Citadel stating that he was in pursuit of a raider fleet, that had attempted to open a dormant relay, through another relay that should have been closed.

Citadel defense sent general Desolas Arterius and the eleventh fleet to deal with the raiders. A full 63 ships and one of the Turians 37 dreadnoughts to act as the flagship of the general. Desolas was giddy at the prospect of commanding one of those legendary behemoths.

A message came over the QEC that Actas had encountered a larger force and needed help. Once through the relay The general reassessed the situation and contacted the Citadel directly, bypassing all regulations for the sake of expediency. His message needed to reach them now!

Deep within the council chambers the three most important people in the galaxy had just finished the last meeting for the day when an emergency broadcast drew their attention.

Salarian councilor Syllas activated his omni-tool and received the message.

"This is councilor Syllas, what is the meaning of this?"

"Thank the spirits. This is General Desolas. I have dire news, captain Actas made a mistake. More than one to be honest. First, this is not their home world, second There are many hundreds of ships here, and third, he has started a war. We have encountered a newzzzzzxxth..."

After that the transmission cut off leaving the chamber quiet as they tried to make sense of it. Sallas was fast and made the connection first. Councilor Tevos was right behind him and Turian councilor Quentios required several more seconds.

"A new species!" He exclaimed. "Those foolish raiders might have released another Rachni from the sleeping systems."

"Calm down Quentios. We still don't know that for certain yet, but the cut off transmission is bad news. Almost nothing can interrupt a QEC signal." Tevos shook her head. "I fear the worst. We should send more ships to support him now."

The salarian councilor waited patiently. He would get the STG report on the initial battle any moment now. A few seconds later and his patience paid off. He opened the video file and watched Arterius's dreadnought get pierced by a concentrated beam of golden energy before exploding in a shower of bright light.

The seventeen cruisers lasted no more than a few minutes longer before they were literary cut into pieces by what he assumed was fighter sized craft. The frigates lasted longer by the merit of being numerous, not effective.

To a mind as well geared for science and analytical thinking as his, several things in the video stood out. The beam that dealt with the dreadnought had to be massive as it was clearly visible against the 800 meter long ship. The fighters seemed immune to the frigates close-in laser weaponry. The last thing that was noticeable, aside from the massive beam not being used again, was the sheer numbers of fighters.

It could be the local colony's interplanetary defense force, but that raised the question of why any one would station so many small fighters on a colony world. The answer was fairly clear as their combat capacity was evident, but their numbers were still too high for planetary defense force.

"There is something you two need to see." he said as the two focused their attention on him, wondering why he had been quiet. The two were predictably shocked at what they could see. Directed Energy Weapons, DEW's, had long been a dream for the salarians but no useful prototype had been built so far.

"By the spirits!" Quentios exclaimed when he saw the dreadnought get impaled by the lance of golden death. "They posses weapons capable of destroying a dreadnought in one shot."

He looked at the others and made the rash decision of ordering more fleets to the system. Their lack of shields suggested that this was their first colony. It would also explain the large number of combat vessels, if they had intended to take the galaxy by force then sending everything one had was just common sense.

Meanwhile, Tevos and Syllas was discussing the planetary development and how big the colony was. If it was too small to properly support the large fleet, then that would suggest that their homeworld was nearby. The fact that first contact with a new species had been through weapons fire and an attempted invasion of one of their worlds would not dawn on either of them for several months.

It was something that would be remembered unfavorably for the foreseeable future as a leaked video revealed their decision all over the extranet.

* * *

A/N

First contact protocol states that any species that encounter a new one must report the find to the citadel. Then they can prepare a diplomatic envoy to travel to their home world and introduce themselves properly.

In case of hostilities the crew is advised to flee and then report to the citadel. Under no circumstance are they allowed to fire back unless they are cornered and unable to flee.

Most races are expected to follow these simple rules, however the Batarians and the Vorcha are far more likely to enslave or eat any newcomers.


End file.
